Matthew Mello

Fr. Matthew Mello has a way of putting people at ease. Whether he is sitting with a grieving family or standing at a microphone in front of local officials, he shows up the same way, calm and steady, the one others look to when things feel uncertain.

To those who know him, he is the same man at a hospital bedside and a public assembly. Across more than three decades in the same corner of Florida, those who have relied on him describe him not just by his title or his long service, but as a constant and reassuring presence, a pastor whose guidance and example move others to serve. He keeps his own sense of the work plain, describing his ministry as counseling the doubtful, comforting the sorrowful, and providing food and shelter for those in need.

His path to the priesthood took a winding route. He was born in New Jersey, went to grade school in Puerto Rico, finished high school in Florida, trained at a seminary in Indiana, and studied theology in Chicago before his ordination in 1987. He has served Central Florida ever since, leading parishes in Lakeland, Winter Haven, and Merritt Island before arriving at Our Lady of Hope in 2020, where he also serves as Vicar Forane of the diocese's Eastern Deanery. He is bilingual in English and Spanish, and has always stayed close to the everyday needs of the community around him.

The thread running through all of it is justice. In each place he has served, Fr. Matt has helped ordinary people organize to change the things that wear them down. In Lakeland he helped grow an interfaith coalition from small assemblies into a movement more than a thousand strong, one that won drug treatment for inmates and health clinics that eased fifteen thousand visits off the local hospital's emergency room. Today, as co-chair of a Volusia County group called F.A.I.T.H., he presses city and county leaders on affordable housing and on fairer treatment for young people who get into trouble. He puts it plainly. "It's not always about making people comfortable," he has said. "It's about seeking justice." But for all the coalitions and campaigns, what he keeps coming back to is simpler. "I love being a priest," he says. "I love my church and God's holy people.